Abstract

The Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) service was set up to manage high risk prisoners who had come to the end of their prison sentence. The current study investigated whether this group of high risk patients remained high risk after their stay in a DSPD unit. This was assessed by predicting their discharge location from their admissions risk assessment scores. Further analyses were run to assess whether sexual offenders and non-sexual offenders scored differently on the PCL-R and the HCR-20. The risk assessment scores of DSPD patients did not predict their discharge location, suggesting that their risk of future violence reduced during their stay in the DSPD unit. The results also found that non-sexual offenders scored significantly higher than sexual offenders on the PCL-R and the HCR-20. These findings have implications for the treatment of these patients and the DSPD service.